Saturday, November 13, 2010

Bucharest Dogs Are Smart!

On our trip to Romania in October we saw lots of feral dogs--lying around in parks, walking all over Bucharest and the countryside, singly and in packs. During the day they are pretty quiet but at night they hang out in packs and make quite a ruckus now and then. Thousands of people get bitten each year--you gotta keep your distance. Bucharest officials are trying to keep down the dog population by catching and neutering dogs--then marking them with a tag in their ears to let them know they've had "the treatment." Here is one such pooch, with a tag in his/her ear:

I thought these dogs were really smart: often at crowded crosswalks we saw them lining up with the humans waiting to cross at the lights. Then when the "green man" lit up and the humans crossed, the dogs did too . . . quite amazing, learned behavior.

But then my daughter Chloe said that the dogs of Romania don't even begin to compare to the ones in Moscow: there they have learned how to sneak up on people to make them drop their food . .. and they've learned how to commute into the city during the day, and out again at night.

One thing is troublesome though--where do these dogs go in the bitter cold of winter? Perhaps they congregate in the subway tunnels that aren't quite so cold as the streets above . . . or ride the trains all day??